by Tom Marcoux
Remember Engaging Language is about cutting through the noise of everything out there that’s competing for attention. Even when audience members look like they’re listening, we do not have access to their internal monologue. Often, an audience member misses the chance to hear the first expression of an idea.
You can repeat a certain phrase three times so that by the end of your presentation, the audience members can finish the sentence. Here’s an example:
“As we all can see, this new product saves time, saves money and disrupts the XY industry. Better thinking makes ….”
“—more profits,” the audience finishes the sentence.
c) Make an idea stick by developing a throughline and narrative.
In my training as a screenwriter and feature film director I've learned how to develop the best in a narrative. A narrative must have a throughline, known as the “driving force of a story.”
Here’s an example of a story. Janet, a 17-year-old young woman tries out for a basketball team and fails.
However, a coaching assistant says, “There’s something in you. I’ll work with you at 6 a.m. every morning.”
With dedication and perseverance, Janet makes the team and becomes the star player. She sinks the winning basket at the same court where she had failed three times before.
In the above narrative, you even see the use of bookends. The first bookend is Janet’s failing to make the team—at a particular court. The final bookend is sinking the winning basket at that same court.
You can adapt a narrative structure into a presentation or pitch.
4. Engage innovation
In my workshops Convince Investors to Fund You (that I’ve delivered in Silicon Valley California and in Thailand at the Igniters International Conference), I have emphasized what comprises a big idea.
A big idea that involves innovation includes unfair advantage, disruption, and big profits.
Innovation is often about combining things that exist. Or it is using a form of new technology in a new way—for example Uber and Lyft.
You can find relevant innovation opportunities when you ask questions like:
How can we make this more convenient and faster to complete?
Where is the real pain point for the user?
Where do people feel frustration?
Frustration is a vital area to focus on. In research studies, people rate a phone call by the level of frustration they felt in previous phone calls that failed to resolve the problem. In a way, it doesn’t matter if the fourth phone call is productive and truly courteous.
Years ago, I talked with three managers at a particular company until a fourth manager solved my problem in 40 seconds. The three previous phone calls and related frustration have a big impact on my impression of the company. Would I recommend that company? Would you?
My own company has this mission:
We create energizing, encouraging edutainment for our good and humankind's rise.
This leads to a question: How can we improve this and actually raise the level of benefit to humankind?
My point here is the Catalyst for Innovation is the use of excellent questions.
5. Light up a question.
How do you feel in hearing questions like:
What would you do if …?
How could you survive if …?
These questions remind me of the teaser moments that get people to watch broadcast news at 11 pm:
“New virus crippling computers across the country. Your computer may be next.
“Worse outbreak of ___ in fifty years. And local authorities are ignoring the consequences.”
Earlier I mentioned the value of a question. When I say light up a question, I mean listen well and discover the question that will fully engage your listener. Focus on a question that aligns with their deepest concerns and their deepest desires.
One of the vital things I’ve learned as a storyteller, screenwriter and feature film director is: Have a strong a villain. To have a compelling brand and engage the listener, show how your product (or service) overcomes some horrible situation.
What or who could the villain could be?
Local authorities who ignore dire consequences
A complacent company that has left a backdoor to hackers
Human ignorance
Sometimes, a client does well with talking up a bleak situation. Then, I say, “Don’t leave the investors in the dark. Show how your innovative solution brightens the world.”
I chose the words, brightens the world, with care. In fantasy stories, when something goes wrong, the entire land is blighted. In the animated feature film, The Lion King, when Scar, the villain, takes over as leader, all the food vanishes, and the sky and land go dark.
In summary, you do not want merely a “good brand.” Instead, develop your Compelling Brand as you use the methods of the C.O.M.P.E.L. process. Provide two things clients (and investors) want—hope and certainty.
Power Principle: Make your brand compelling—provide hope and certainty.
Power Questions: What brief phrases engage your listener’s emotions? How can you demonstrate that your solution brightens the client/investor’s world?
Part 4
New Material plus Classic Material from
Be Heard and Be Trusted
—celebrating 20 years
Twenty years ago, I developed material that became a book that I later retitled as Be Heard and Be Trusted. A version of that book went into the Cogswell Polytechnical College Time Capsule to be opened in 2100.
In subsequent years, I reformulated and refined the work. In celebration of my research and work with clients, MBA students (at Stanford University) and audiences, I’m sharing the below new material and classic material from Be Heard and Be Trusted. I’m also including new interviews with a billionaire, millionaires, a former deputy manager at NASA and more.
Be Heard-20 Method #1
Great Communicators Handle Fear
What if you could handle fear and get it out of your way? How amazing and fulfilling would your life be?
As you learn how to handle fear, you will become someone who is heard and trusted. Top professionals are heard and trusted because people believe that they can handle fear with grace and strength.
The greatest communicators have a special advantage: they are skilled in communicating with themselves. They talk to themselves in ways that get them into action.
How do you talk to yourself about your fears? Many people have become paralyzed by fear. If they have read some idea about how to deal with their fear, trying to apply that idea merely frustrates them.
Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The good news is that this section will help you work with the fear and transform it into something you can use to lift your life to a higher level of success and fulfillment.
Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. – Meg Cabot
What could be more important than fear? Living your life with joy and fulfillment.
I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
– Joseph Campbell
Fear affects much of what we do and what we avoid doing. Some of us are truly diminished by the fear of being hurt. But if we have ways to deal with pain, we become stronger. We experience more freedom.
This discussion about fear is vital if you want to be a great communicator, someone who is heard and trusted. Great communicators deal with their own fears, and they help their audiences handle fear, too. Great communicators guide audiences to move beyond fear to real freedom.
To have the personal energy to handle fear, we often need to clear some emotional space. Here are Dr. Fred Luskin’s comments on how to free ourselves from pain by engaging in the process of forgiveness.
Nine Steps of Forgive
ness
by Dr. Fred Luskin
My book Forgive for Good: A Proven Prescription for Health and Happiness is a primer on how to make peace when things you choose, or things chosen for you do not work out well. When painful things happen, you have a choice. I teach people to make more forgiving choices. I do this because I understand that as a function of life everyone will have painful experiences as well as pleasant ones. It is a singular power to be able to handle what comes your way without getting lost in blame and suffering. We do not know what the game of life has in store, but we do know that forgiveness is one way that provides strength to get back into the game.
As Director of the Stanford Forgiveness Projects my forgiveness methodology has been tested and shown to be successful through a number of research projects. We have demonstrated that forgiveness can reduce stress, blood pressure, anger, depression, hurt, and increase optimism, hope, compassion, physical vitality, and forgiveness. We have worked with people who have been lied to, cheated, abandoned, physically injured, beaten, abused or had their children murdered. Forgiveness training made a significant difference in many of their lives. What follows is our nine-step method of teaching and becoming forgiving.
Nine Steps to Forgiveness
1. Know exactly how you feel about what happened and be able to articulate what about the situation is not OK. Then, tell a couple of trusted people about your experience.
2. Make a commitment to yourself to do what you have to do to feel better. Forgiveness is for you and not for anyone else.
3. Forgiveness does not necessarily mean reconciliation with the person that upset you or condoning of their action. What you are after is to find peace. Forgiveness can be defined as the “peace and understanding that come from blaming that which has hurt you less, taking the life experience less personally, and amending your grievance story.”
4. Get the right perspective on what is happening. Recognize that your primary distress is coming from the hurt feelings, thoughts, and physical upset you are suffering now, not what offended you or hurt you two minutes—or ten years—ago.
5. At the moment you feel upset practice stress management to soothe your body’s flight or fight response.
6. Give up expecting things from other people, or your life, that they do not choose to give you. Recognize the “unenforceable rules” you have for your health or how you or other people must behave. Remind yourself that you can hope for health, love, friendship and prosperity, and work hard to get them. However, you will suffer when you demand these things occur when you do not have the power to make them happen.
7. Put your energy into looking for another way to get your positive goals met than through the experience that has hurt you. I call this step finding your positive intention. Instead of mentally replaying your hurt, seek out new ways to get what you want.
8. Remember that a life well lived is your best revenge. Instead of focusing on your wounded feelings, and thereby giving the person who caused you pain power over you, learn to look for the love, beauty, and kindness around you. Appreciate what you have more than attending to what you do not have.
9. Amend your grievance story to remind you of the heroic choice to forgive.
Dr. Fred Luskin, author of Forgive for Good, presents the forgiveness training methodology that has been validated through six successful research studies conducted through the Stanford Forgiveness Projects. His presentations explore the HEAL process of forgiveness that, when learned, can lead to enhanced well-being through self-care. In class practice may include guided imagery, journal writing and discussion all presented in a safe and nurturing environment. Dr. Luskin holds a Ph.D. in Counseling and Health Psychology from Stanford University.
Dr. Luskin continues to serve as Director of the Stanford Forgiveness Projects. In addition, his work has been successfully applied and researched in corporate, medical, legal and religious settings. He currently serves as a Senior Consultant in Health Promotion at Stanford University and is a Professor at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. He presents lectures, workshops, seminars and trainings on the importance, health benefits and training of forgiveness, stress management and emotional competence throughout the United States.
www.LearningToForgive.com
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When we know how to deal with great pain, we can free up our personal energy. With more energy, we can take our lives and our businesses to higher levels.
The most successful people, those who enjoy personal fulfillment, are skillful in the ways they handle fear and disappointment. They realize this truth:
We fear the thing we want the most. – Dr. Robert Anthony
Some of us fear getting on a grander stage in life. Others fear more responsibilities that come with a higher-level role—like becoming CEO for the first time.
We can handle fear and greater responsibilities as we guard our personal energy.
* * * * * *
Be Heard-20 Method #2
Handle Criticism Well
The greatest communicators realize that fear subsides when you devote yourself to the process and focus in the moment.
The way you overcome shyness is to become so wrapped up in something that you forget to be afraid. – Lady Bird Johnson
The most productive people in any field realize that in order to improve, you need to practice your craft. We can also learn to deal with criticism of our earliest work. Some people feel social pressure because they fear that they cannot recover from the criticism of their early work.
I worked with a client, a filmmaker, who found that someone had taken excerpts from her first film and placed them on YouTube.com. She developed her own answers to criticism:
“Did you laugh?”
“Works for some; doesn’t work for others.”
“That was at the beginning of my career.”
“That’s a part of my body of work.”
Just knowing how she would be able to respond to any criticism lowered my client’s fear level. With less fear, she was free to devote her energy to her current work. Do you see how being prepared for criticism can free up your personal energy?
LaChelle Adkins shares insights in how being transparent actually sets other people at ease.
Interview with LaChelle Adkins
Tom: How can you develop more trust when you do not seek validation from others?
LaChelle: When you’re not seeking validation, this process disarms people.
When you’re able to accept your whole self, the good and bad, then this allows you to focus on the business at hand.
I’m not concerned about what happened to me yesterday—or even five minutes before I arrive at a business meeting. I am able to focus completely on what I’m doing. And I remember what it is that I’m there to bring to the table. I’m not looking for approval from other people.
I am at ease. I’m not judging myself harshly. I’m not judging the other people. Many people have seen my story about being hospitalized for stress as a weakness. And, I saw it that way for a long time. But then I realized that I had control in that outcome. I was no longer looking at it from a victim standpoint but now as a victor. Now, I can use that experience not only to help myself grow, but I can help others learn, who may be dealing with the same type of stresses, anxiety and depression that I had experienced.
You can be stronger when you don’t seek validation. For example, if there was a car accident, and I arrive late to a meeting, I am not looking for other people to say, “It’s okay that you’re late.” When I’m not looking for validation, I’m able to fill myself up with whatever I need to perform at my maximum potential—when I’m in the business meeting. To make this clearer: I recognize what I can control and what I cannot. So, in the case of arriving late to the meeting, I do not feel that others are judging me in a negative way. I feel the same about myself as if I arrived on time. This allows me to be stronger because I choose to be proactive rather than reactive about an accident that was out of my cont
rol.
Tom: How can you build trust by being appropriately transparent?
LaChelle: The opposite of transparent is wearing a mask. I’ve noticed that people are wearing masks often. When you’re in a business meeting, you don’t want to talk about how your business may be losing money. There are elephants in the room that people want to avoid talking about.
People can trust you when you’re dealing with reality, and that’s a situation of good and bad.
People can feel more at ease with you because your mask is down.
Even if you come in contact with someone who is really positive and you resonate with that person, you can still have, at the back of your mind, the sense that this is too good to be true. You think, “They resonate with me. Here’s a nice person.” But you still wait for the other shoe to drop. It appears that we’re conditioned by society to be wary that somebody is hiding something. Things are just not what they appear to be. This has an impact on how we relate to other people.
I recommend that you avoid being so guarded. This disarms people because they are impressed that someone doesn’t have a problem in admitting that they went through a tough situation. If the other person sees that it’s not a hang up for you, they see how you have real confidence. Your skillset is more credible. They feel like they really see you as a person and that they know you a lot better than just having a surface conversation.
Tom: Based on your experiences, how are you able to help your clients?
LaChelle: Having gone through tough times now helps me to really see other people. Before, I couldn’t really see people because I was caught up in my own issues. I would be caught up in half-listening. My mind was caught up in fears of not being a good mom. “Am I being a good wife? Am I doing this right?” All of these different questions.